Naturalis v1.1-alpha5 Release (Patreon)

Alright guys, a lot of new stuff in this one! The videos linked in this post and some of the earlier posts are also viewable in the Hub post.

Clothing Adjustments

Clothing UI

The clothing UI is still WIP but getting closer to done. I imagine that as I add more controls (for e.g. additional morphs, soft physics adjustments, sim cloth forces etc.), there will be need to add nesting instead of showing all elements all at once. Scrolling is not an option!

• "Clothing" is now a top level navigation tab
• better layout
• shorter labels in the popup for items in var packages
• added item enabled toggle
• the popup keeps all items that have been enabled since the plugin was initialized, so any item you've disabled can be re-enabled via this UI
• new functionalities, see below

Revamped Hold % implementation, dampening sliders

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/069fdab31b1ce6c38f/40f057ab9d8eefd2

The previous Hold % implementation was a bit problematic and unrealistic. It countered gravity effectively, but didn't actually resist any other forces.

The new implementation simply increases the joint springs, and allows the amount of dampening to be adjusted separately. This is a bit like VAM's original Spring/Damper multiplier slider in the clothing item's settings, but is more comprehensive and configurable.

XY Hold increases rotation spring and left/right spring, while Z Hold increases in/out spring. At 0%, spring is at the calibrated value, while at 100% it's maxed out. Similarly, XY Dampening increases rotation Z damper and left/right damper, while Z Dampening increases in/out damper.

Adjust morphing offsets in the clothing profile

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/ac9fdab31b1ce6c125/6b6dd64c76a7e216

The morph offsets allow you to shift the angle that is used for calculating morph values when the joint rotates or moved in the in/out direction. This produces morphing without actually rotating or moving the joint. The idea is to primarily use the forces to physically move the breasts, and then fine tune the shape with the morph offsets.

Enabling/disabling the profile or the clothing item itself transitions the morphs smoothly along the Morph Transition timer. The offsets change along an exponential curve - similar to how the acceleration caused by gravity changes velocity exponentially.

Force amounts adapt to breast size

• the force amounts automatically adapt to different breast sizes, allowing the same profile to be used for different sizes
• it should work pretty reliably, producing more or less the intended effect, but you might still need different profiles (once saving/loading is implemented..) for very small breasts and very large breasts, for example
• (not yet implemented for glute sizes)

Asymmetric clothing profiles + profile active triggers

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/ac9fdbbb1b12e3c325/3a95cf0d2c54460b

By default, clothing profiles are symmetric. If the Is Symmetric toggle is enabled, the Left and Right buttons are activated and you can switch between the left and right parameters. Any changes to the sliders from that point onward are specific to the selected side. If you make the profiles symmetric again, the left parameters become the active parameters for both sides, but the changes to the right parameters are still there if you want to go back to the asymmetric mode.

With an asymmetric profile, the Profile Active toggle is also specific to each side. (This might be a bit unintuitive, but toggling just one side off is necessary and I don't want to complicate things with a top level Active toggle and separate asymmetric side specific Active toggles.)

The Profile Active toggle is available as a triggerable boolean. The trigger is named "Profile active: <label>" where the label is the same as the item's label in the dropdown in the Clothing UI. You only see these triggers for items that have been enabled since the plugin was initialized - if you set up a scene with triggers, reloading the plugin might break your setup. I'll try to figure out how to ensure the triggers are kept and don't break between scene loads either. (Creating triggers for all of your thousand clothing items on every initialization isn't really a good idea...)

None of the other stuff in the clothing UI is triggerable yet (and isn't saved anywhere).

Clothing layers support

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/4d9fdab31b1ce6c4c4/b40fd8c46573de75

• any number of clothing items can apply their adjustment profiles simultaneously
• profiles can apply forces or morph offsets in opposite directions, and the sum of those is the final value
• profiles cannot amplify each other: the sum cannot be higher (if positive) or lower (if negative) than the highest/lowest force or offset applied by an individual profile
• hold and dampening values are the combined highest values of currently active profiles

Fixes

• fixed clothing adjustment force not using the correct right breast/glute rigidbody for calculating the direction of force, resulting in the sideways force causing the right joint to tilt in the wrong direction

Gravity Simulation

• gravity on hair and cloth sims is also simulated
• gravity simulation controls can be hidden with the < button, and shown again with the > button
• fixed issue where exiting UI during calibration would stop the gravity simulation that happens during calibration

Gravity simulation controls are also available as triggerable actions:

"Left" refers to the "->" button in the plugin UI while "Right" refers to the "<-" button. This is because Left is the person's left, but the plugin UI shows the arrows from your point of view when facing the model.

Physics

• the custom gravity sliders in the Breast Weight/Glute Weight window now work with the Apply Changes Only To Left Breast/Glute checkbox
• reduced joint Rotation Damper max value from 10 to 5, and In/Out Damper max from 100 to 50 (the lower max values are already very high)

Breast morphing

The way that breast depth is calibrated and calculated is technically improved (the chest joint's position and rotation relative to the breast joint is cancelled out and the amount that the depth changes is more consistent). One noticeable effect of this is that depth morphs now get automatically applied a bit more when breasts are pushed all the way up. This is probably because the chest joint is higher up than the pectoral joint, but that difference in height is now cancelled out.

❕ Since this changes the calibration, scenes saved with earlier versions won't auto-apply the calibration data when loaded with only v1.1-alpha5 or newer present. The plugin will go through the usual calibration cycle instead.

Other:

• slightly increased sideways out morphing
• fixed too much depth out morphing when leaning to the side
• slightly reduced depth in morph radius (size should be more consistent, but there's less volume increase to compensate for volume loss that happens with collision - it's a tradeoff...)

Glute morph offsets

Added offsets to BootyMagic Morphs window, allowing the calibrated joint angle and depth to be offset manually.

You can use this to fine tune the joint angle/depth where morphs are zero, and get the morphs to adjust in a way that's ideal for a specific look or in a specific pose. Essentially, adjusting the offset is the same as if you hypothetically calibrated the plugin in a different pose than the one that's actually used.

I'm still looking into whether the same controls should be added to TittyMagic, it needs some testing.

Calibration

• reduced the joint springs in the calibration pose - the actual joint angles should be more comparable with a typical standing pose where joint springs aren't very high
• fixed an issue where calibration would go through too quickly and could produce an inaccurate result, causing morphs to be slightly off

Misc UI development and fixes

• selected gravity direction is highlighted on button press
• fixed issue where the Show Collider Previews elements in Fat Collider Radius and Fat Distance Limit windows overlapped with the gravity simulation controls (introduced in alpha 4)
• dark colors for the gravity simulation controls and the Show Collider Previews elements
• fixed issue where soft physics parameter values were not shown in BootyMagic (introduced in alpha 4)
• Gravity simulation controls now align correctly on the left side if using right side VR UI
• prevent toggling soft physics via plugin during calibration

______

A few notes about what I'll be working on next:

(1) The improved forward droop morph shape still needs work. The main issue is that the new morph shrinks the radius at the base of the breast, and it looks weird when that radius animates when the person isn't even leaning forward. The morph amount needs to be tied to the pose angle, and the current system doesn't apply specific morphs based on pose angles so the system needs a small amount of redesigning to support this. This is starting to go into the territory of "morphing system improvements" which I already postponed to v1.2, but I'm going to try to get this done in v1.1 since the new forward droop shape would be so much better than the current one.

(2) Clothing profile saving/loading/defaults, included default profiles for built in clothing items, possibly some templates to pick from. Profiles created for items in var packages will be package version independent.

(3) Probably will bring back the clothing UI info panel back in some form. With the actual force amounts etc.. It'd be good to know some numbers about how much springs and dampers are being changed, how much forces and morphs etc. are being applied, per left/right if asymmetric, and as a combined result of all currently active profiles if using multiple layers of clothing. It could be an external panel that can be hidden similar to the gravity simulation panel.

(4) Looking into additional physics parameter adjustments (automatic and/or configurable) besides the spring (hold %) and damper added in this release.

(5) Trying to figure out how to detect the sim cloth edge for the edge squeeze effect.

(6) Thinking about ways to auto-detect settings from clothing tags or sim cloth physics settings - it'd be awesome to be able to equip an item and it'd "just work" with no need to even save a profile.

(7) Breast morphing/physics when soft physics is disabled needs some fine tuning.

-everlaster